ABA League Elects Erkan and Perez, Kmetovic Stays Director
The ABA League Assembly in Ljubljana elected Ibrahim Erkan as sporting director and Miguel Angel Perez Perez as referee commissioner, while Red Star's demand to remove Dubravko Kmetovic did not pass.
Ljubljana was full of officials on Saturday morning, not players. The hall that is hosting the celebration of the ABA League’s quarter century turned, on the same day, into the place where regional basketball got a new leadership, capping a week in which backroom clashes had drawn more attention than anything happening on the court.
The Assembly was originally due to start a day earlier, on Friday, September 4, at 10 a.m. On a proposal from Ostoja Mijailovic, the session was moved to Saturday at 9 a.m., and only then did every Assembly member show up. Every decision that followed passed by a two-thirds majority, by secret ballot, without exception.
The biggest item on the agenda was the election of a new sporting director. The job went to Ibrahim Erkan, who arrives from a leadership post at the Euroleague and has previously worked in Turkish basketball as well. Erkan succeeds Milija Vojinovic, who decided to end his cooperation with the ABA League after six and a half years in the role and now serves as sporting director of KK Vojvodina.
The competition for the seat was not thin. Erkan beat out Milos Vujanic, the celebrated Serbian national team player, Milutin Aleksic, a former player turned expert consultant, Denis Pavlovic, Josip Samardzija, general manager of Zagreb’s Cibona rival Dinamo, and Nemanja Vasiljevic, Red Star’s director. Five serious names came away without a seat, which says something about how open the race stayed until the final vote was counted.
The second major change concerns officiating. Miguel Angel Perez Perez, a Spanish referee who officially closed out his refereeing career in 2024 after 25 years in Spain’s top domestic league, the ACB, was elected commissioner for delegating and president of the Referee Commission. Robert Brdar was elected the new disciplinary judge.
What brought the most tension into the Assembly, though, was not any of these three elections but a letter that never came from a candidate at all. Ahead of the session, Red Star sent a letter demanding the removal of Dubravko Kmetovic as competition director and the termination of cooperation with the law firm working for the league. Srpske.rs had reported on that session and that demand a day earlier, when it was still unclear whether the change would go through.
It did not. Kmetovic stayed at the helm of the ABA League, and with a task that carries real weight for the whole story: he is the one who must agree commercial terms with Erkan and Perez Perez before either of them officially takes up his new seat. The league said as much in plain terms.
The election process will be fully completed and the elected candidates will take office only once ABA League director Dubravko Kmetovic has agreed commercial terms with them.
That means Saturday in Ljubljana was not, formally, the last stop in this story. Erkan and Perez Perez have been elected, but not yet confirmed in office, until those negotiations are finished, and the man leading them is exactly the one whose removal Red Star had sought. If this recalls a familiar pattern, it is the moment when a win on paper and the actual start of the job are not the same thing, and how long the gap between them stretches will only become clear once Kmetovic and the two newcomers sit down at the table.
For a league marking 25 years of existence, this was a day of personnel decisions, not basketball. What is worth watching next is not a new coach or a new transfer, but whether the new sporting director will actually take up his post before the season begins.
